Something new in a neighbourhood that hasn’t seen much significant change in decades: a highrise – the Alexandra on English Bay, just off Davie Street on Bidwell, near the park that it references.
The Alexandra is another design to be added to the ‘Henriquez Collection’ (from the firm of Henriquez Partners, notably the father and son, Richard and Gregory). I’ve documented five of them in the West End in the traditional Price Tags – among them the Sylvia Extension and Eugenia, just a couple of blocks away.
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The Alexandra was certainly contentious, being one of the first STIR projects that was given massive bonus density in return for guaranteed rental apartments. But then controversy accompanied the other Henriquez highrises when they were proposed.
Some nice touches are appearing,
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perforated screens similar in spirit to those used on the Woodward’s condo tower, also by the Henriquez firm, which add a sense of custom design along with the other’green’ features.
The tower is nicely slotted into that part of the West End, still in scale with its neighbours and sufficently separated to give some breathing room. (Click to enlarge rendering on left.)
The greater impact comes from the podium, which at four-to-five storeys creates a strong streetwall on Davie. It seems to work, given other buildings of similar scale in that block, but it’s the similarity to the point-and-podium Yaletown model that turns off a lot of the natives (who, I suspect, would have been critics of the Corbusian highrises that typified the ’60s West End: sheer slabs surrounded by open space, too often parking lots).
The inclusion of the facade of the old mission-style ‘Maxine’s’ on the east side … well, we see when it’s finished. But generally such token facadism does not turn out well.
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STIR incentives aside, this tower is important because it gives a sense of what the City may be willing to entertain on the Davie and Robson blocks west of Jervis. We’ll see what settles out of the current West End planning process.
Richard Henriquez, the father, has had a certain genius in getting his designs approved by finding the few remaining developable sites under the highly constrained West End zoning bylaw from 1989, and then making a case for tower solutions. In doing so he has raised the standards of West End highrises – and here again, the firm may have set the precedent for what comes next.
The cross sections on Davie can certainly support 3 – 4 storey podium street walls. Davie looks kind of shabby now with little new development in decades. Perhaps this is the harbinger of positive change to come.
The Alexandra on English Bay (on the Maxines site) makes a mockery of heritage protection. The development creates a walled effect on lower Davie, On bright and sunny afternoons the tower casts a dark shadow across the street for two blocks — making the distant beach look like a light at the end of a tunnel. Pedestrians are suddenly plunged into relative darkness as they pass the building. The sudden appearance of 18-20 stories proposed for Davie from Denman to Jervis Streets (five blocks, both sides of the street) in the CoV city staff proposal in the West End community plan, as revealed last week, will create a canyon effect as one moves along Davie street. If built out, it is likely to look like the dark, un-peopled Alberni Street stretching blocks west from Thurlow. Architects may love the profits and fun of designing, but the professions of planning and architecture should challenge themselves, demonstrate their professional ethics, and show three-dimensional models of what the outcome will be like if this is all built out. Henriquez Junior, author of “Toward and Ethical Architecture,” might wish to try a bit of community consultation next time, BEFORE the yellow rezoning sign appears on his projects’ proposed site. Will he have the courage to hear from the public before a project gets placed in the pipeline, having already received the tacit approval from the planning department?
When you start to get to the heights of the base, it becomes an exaggeration to call it a podium. Instead this is a building on its side underneath another building. And the expression of the building along that block pressed up to the property line is imposing, intimidating, generally uncomfortable.
There are other buildings at the height of 4 to 5 storeys nearby, but at least the facing surfaces on these other buildings create interest through angles and design, unlike the uninspiring stark cliff of this Henriquez wall fronting Davie.
It offers a similar sense of place to other ‘low-rent’ looking purpose built rental buildings and hotels on that scuzzy stretch of Granville between Drake and Helmcken.
I would urge anyone to linger along this block of Davie on either side of the street to see how long they would be comfortable before feeling the urge to move to get to some place else.
And rather than speculating what critics may be thinking of this soon to be home for mostly non-occupied owner investments taking up air space, perhaps engage people in a discussion and ask what they think so you can know for certain. It can’t be too hard to find an actual opinion about it from someone in the West End.
Perhaps then Vancouver can move in a direction of incredible architecture that inspires and creates homes rather than a utility for high turnover shelter / investment parking.
Portraying this as a collection seems questionable; such a perspective tends to blur the very real and significant differences between the work of Richard Henriquez and Gregory Henriquez. I find virtues in the work of each of these talented architects, to be sure, but they have produced work that is remarkably different.